About Me

Wednesday, 10 April 2013

The Invention of Solitude - The Portrait of an Invisible Man - by Paul Auster ...

As I finished reading the first part of the Invention of Solitude - The Portrait of an Invisible Man, I felt the father figure being described had quite a few characteristics in common with somebody who played a fairly similar role in my life, though at a companionship's level and in spite of not having altered any of my disappointment feelings regarding the situation it did make me aware of the clear fact that some people are "not cut out to" play certain roles in life (which had not occurred to me) and more so in the justification for it - the simple fact they "have no talent" for such roles.

"For a man who finds life tolerable only by staying on the surface of himself, it is natural to be satisfied with offering no more than his surface to others. There are few demands to be met, and no commitment is required. Marriage, on the other hand, closes the door. Your existence is confined to a narrow space in which you are constantly forced to reveal yourself - and therefore, constantly obliged to look into yourself, to examine your own depths."

"Solitary. But not in the sense of being alone. Not solitary in the way Thoreau was, for example, exiling himself in order to find out where he was; not solitary in the way Jonah was, praying for deliverance in the belly of the whale. Solitary in the sense of retreat. In the sense of not having to see himself, of not having to see himself being seen by anyone else."